Focusing for Stage Two Entrepreneurs

Last week I focused on evolutionary entrepreneurs in stage one of their businesses and where to focus their energies for maximum impact. For those of you further along in building your business, the issues shift to a degree. That’s what we’re going to cover today.

In stage two, you have $6,000-9,000 per month in consistent income, consistent clients, you are living on your business revenue or near to that, you are actively building your database (email list), and you are building a support team.

In stage two you still need to stay focused on generating revenue–actually that focus does not waive really ever. But how you do that begins to shift when you have more consistent revenue and more consistent clients.

Focus in stage two: build your income streams, your team and your infrastructure, and your database.

People in stage two are super busy.I mean super busy doing the actual business of business. Here are the key areas:

(1) Developing multiple income streams: You need to keep always focusing on where the money is coming from in stage two, but you get to start diversifying your income streams. In stage one, you are still focusing mostly on getting private clients. That’s the foundation of any service-based business. Once you’ve got consistent clients and consistent income, you can look at adding more income streams.

At this point, you can begin to add group programs and explore building out your multiple income streams. You can have VIP Days in your offerings early on, and a few different options (sessions, packages, and programs), but mostly you want it pretty simple while you are building to stage two. That’s because you need a client base and a data base in order to be able to offer group programs and actually have enough people enroll in them!

In developing your multiple streams, you need to be guiding your people from one offering to another so that they have obvious ways to work with you, and obvious ways to take the next step. This includes going from free offers, to paid offers, from lower priced products and programs to higher priced ones.

NOTE: If you at one point had consistent income and clients, and don’t at the moment, it’s important for you to go back and build that base. If you have a big enough and dedicated enough data base, you might be able to offer multiple streams, but chances are you don’t. That’s why your income had dipped, right? So it’s important for you to be honest with yourself about the situation you are in, and go back to basics.

(2) Developing their team: They are delegating more and more to team members, a virtual assistant, a client support person, a web designer, and don’t forget the bookkeeper! Yes, they should be building a team that includes these characters. One of the biggest issues for entrepreneurs in stage two is learning to ask for help, training other people to do what they’ve been doing, and also learning from their support staff how to do things more effectively and efficiently. Ideally your support team will be able to provide you with ideas, directions on how to create systems, and helping to develop your infrastructure.

Developing systems becomes super important at this stage because you have multiple people working on multiple things, you simply cannot track and keep it all in your head! Adding systems and standard operating procedures (SOPs) becomes a must.

(3) Developing your database: in this day and age we call that your email list, or just your list for short. In earlier days it was your rolodex or your phone book! Whatever the form, entrepreneurs have always understood the value of what I call your Village. The people who know who you are and what you do, who are interested, some of whom will buy from you now and into the future. In stage two, you begin to put a lot more emphasis on building your list because you now have a support team who can help you do that more effectively. This entails making use of the power of internet marketing to spread the word about what you’re up to, and what you’re offering.

This of course is a huge area, but the main emphasis are virtual events that include multiple speakers who all promote the events, joint venture partnerships, and social media campaigns.